01 serena

A poster that visualizes the persona of a classmate, Serena Chen, an Information Systems major from Shen Zhen, China. I created a print piece focused on creating a sense of wonder, and built upon the juxtaposition between Serena's native language, Chinese, and her second language, English, through her love of journal writing.

GOALS

To visualize who Serena is.

To visually capture the confusion and uncertainty between different languages, especially the difference between Serena's written text and verbal explanations.

To use ethos, as a way of understanding the difference, confusion, and sense of loss and wonder in languages.

CHALLENGE

As an international student and a non-major, Serena was not fully integrated within a studio class filled of 20 Communication Design majors who have been together for all of college.

My main challenge was to create a dynamic print piece that is both informative of and informed by my subject. I wanted to make it relatable to the audience, as a way of introducing a deeper understanding of Serena to others.

CONTENT DECISIONS

I decided to keep the English text as a transcription of when Serena shared her stories and explained her thoughts about what she wrote. By choosing parts of her story with hints of "Chinglish," I wanted to allow the audience to absorb the nuances between the two texts, as a way to capture two different personas. There is an inherent difference between original text, translations, and explanations. I used the original written text compared to the explanations to describe the Serena has a liveliness and quirkiness to her that she did not express out of class. So, similarly, with the two different texts, the original Chinese is much more expressive and rich, while the English after thoughts are more pensive and slightly subdued.

VISUAL DECISIONS

I decided to use the constellation of her Capricorn horoscope and a gradient background to further push the sense of foreignness and wonder, and to suggest a whimsical depth within a 2 dimensional platform. To show part of Serena's reflective and introspective side, I also stylized the text as a staggered poem, in which the English is graphically pushed back to emulate translations and to suggest the relation between the two languages.

DETAILS

Here are some detail shots of the 34" x 48" poster.

PROCESS

Here are a few select pages from Serena's journal, which she kindly allowed me to photograph, some examples of my script with both Chinese text taken from her journals, and English text transcribed from our conversations, and a sample of my sketches.

02 miyazaki

A poster with only color and pattern changes and a poster that includes images.

Goals

To capture the sense of fantasy in Hayao Miyazaki films through visual hierarchy, color and graphics, and limited typographic choices.

To create a dynamic system that can be adapted for a variety of Miyazaki films.

DESIGN DECISIONS

To capture the whimsical, yet fantastical mood of his films, I tried to create interaction and suggest action through a contrast of visuals and color. Because Miyazaki films are so well recognized, I decided to use hints of screen grabs from his films to both draw the attention of Miyazaki fans and to intrigue those who might not be aware of his films.

Final poster Series

Process

Examples of initial exercises and iterations as I developed my concept.